Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday June 15, 1920
Logan County, West Virginia – Bastion of Industrial Feudalism
From The Nation of June 12, 1920:
Company-Owned Americans
By ARTHUR GLEASON
Montani semper liberi
(Motto of West Virginia)
Harrisburg Telegraph October 16, 1919
THE attorney of the Mine Workers has filed suits against the coal companies who have evicted miners. Each suit is for $10,000 damages for unlawful eviction. This touches the heart of the West Virginia trouble. In the non-union counties, houses are owned by the coal companies. Justice is administered by the coal companies. Constitutional rights are interpreted by the coal companies. Food and clothing are sold (though not exclusively) in company stores. The miners worship in a company church, are preached at by a company pastor; play pool in the company Y. M. C. A.; gain education in a company school; receive treatment from a company doctor and hospital; die on company land. From the cradle to the grave, they draw breath by the grace of the sometimes absentee coal owner, one of whose visible representatives is the deputy sheriff, a public official in the pay of the coal owner. As a worker under similar conditions once said: “We work in his plant. We live in his house. Our children go to his school. On Sunday we go to hear his preacher. And when we die we are buried in his cemetery.”
The employees live in company houses. Everything belongs to the mine owners, and home ownership is not permitted. The lease of the Logan Mining Company reads that when the miner’s employment ceases, “either for cause or without cause the right of said employee and his family to use and occupy premises shall simultaneously end and terminate.” The miners generally pay $8 a month for a four room house, a dollar for coal, 50 cents to a dollar for lights. Fulton Mitchell, deputy sheriff, states:
My understanding is that most of the companies have a form of lease, and when they lease to miners they reserve the right to object to any person other than employees coming on their possessions.
Hellraisers Journal – Monday June 13, 1910
Fresno, California – Fellow Worker Little Reports on Fight to Organize Local 66
From the Industrial Worker of June 11, 1910:
LIBERTY VS. THE LAW.
Fresno, Cal., May 29, 1910.
Editor Industrial Worker: The meeting of the I. W. W. in the public park today was suppressed by the county officials, backed by the uniformed thugs of the city. The constitution of the nation and state was stolen by the chief of police. The Industrial Worker was taken from one of the members. This park is supposed to belong to the people of Fresno county.
So you can see we are up against a big fight here in the near future. All fighters must prepare to come to Fresno when the call is sent out.
The chief of police says he will call on the G. A. R. and the Spanish War Veterans to wipe out the i. W. W.
Yours for Industrial Freedom,
F. H. LITTLE,
Organizer of the I. W. W.
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We are taking in new members every day, and the sentiment is strong for Industrial Unionism. We expect to do something here this summer, as this is one of the best places in the west for agitation. There are lots of Germans and Russians here and they are ripe for organization. The Mexicans, Japanese and Chinese are lining up.
We have a bunch of agitators here-English, Mexican, German and Japanese-and are stirring things up. The masters see that we are jarring the workers loose from their conservative ideas.
The papers have announced that the A. F. of L. will organize the laborers-that is, the white slaves. They are going to run the Japanese out of the country.
They are also going to organize the farmers and the farm employes into one union. Ye gods and little fishes! Just think. The man who sweats and toils out in the hot sun, the man who produces all things good and has nothing, to belong to the same union as his master, who does nothing and has all. But I think they will fail, for the blanket stiff who is forced to hike over the road and carry his home on his back is too wise for the A. F. of L. labor faker.
All Fellow Workers who are looking for a master and who want to do good work for the I. W. W. would do well to stop at this place. We need as many agitators in this part of the country as we can get, for we expect to tie up this whole country this fall. We have the silent strike on. It is on a job for the Southern Pacific. The slave drivers are wild-the slaves won’t work as hard as they want them to. We have a bunch of I. W. W. men on the job and we swill get control soon. Then we expect to give them a dose of I. W. W. direct action. So keep your eye on Fresno and watch Local No. 66 grow. Will send you a line from time to time and let you know what is doing. Yours for Freedom.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday June 12, 1910
Mother Jones News Round-Up for May 1910, Part II:
-Found Continuing Fight for Milwaukee Brewery Girls and Mexican Comrades
From Missouri’s Scott County Kicker of May 14, 1910:
OF INTEREST TO WOMEN.
Perhaps the noblest woman in America today is “Mother Jones.” From a school teacher she consecrated her life to the cause of oppressed humanity, and where-ever the fight is thickest, there is Mother Jones-some 70 years old. Jails have no terror for her. She champions the freedom of all the race-men and women alike. In a recent speech at Milwaukee she said to the women:
Put away your parlor airs and get out into the street and fight, fight, fight! It may not be ladylike, but it is womanly. God made woman; rotten society made the lady.
[Photograph added.]
From the Appeal to Reason of May 14, 1910:
Mexican Refugees Left to Their Fate
Mother Jones and others made strenuous efforts to secure an investigation of the cases of Magon, Villareal and other Mexicans imprisoned in American bastiles at the instance of the tyrant of Mexico and the interest of American investment in that land. Resolutions were introduced into congress asking for such investigation. Now the resolutions have been recommended unfavorably by the judiciary committee before which they went, and that with a pointed insult to American labor and patriotism.
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday June 11, 1910
Mother Jones News Round-Up for May 1910, Part I:
-Found Speaking in Sioux City, Iowa, and Fort Wayne, Indiana
From The Sioux City Journal of May 2, 1910:
FIGHTING WORKERS NEEDED.
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Mother Jones Says Capitalism Drives
Laboring Men to Drink.
We don’t get the philosophy we want from the preachers, that is why we don’t go to church.
-declared Mother Jones, known country wide as a battler for the cause of the working man, during her address before a large socialistic audience at Bennett’s hall last night.
[She continued:]
Ministers never work. We need fighting workers now.
Mother Jones is well advanced in years and small in stature. In her opinion the capitalistic class owns the officials, the policemen and the ministers. She has her own theory regarding prohibition. She figures the antisaloon leagues are going at the question from the wrong side. In her opinion the factories in which the working men toil away their lives and the hardships imposed upon them by the capitalistic class drive them to drink, and it is through a radical change from this source that temperance will come.
The speaker said the womanhood of the nation is sinking slowly but gradually because girls and women are forced from home to sweatshops, where also may be found little children. When the history of this age is written, in her opinion, it will go down on the books as the most corrupt of all times. If the women would assert themselves she believes the trouble of the working man would be cleared up over night.
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday June 10, 1920
Butte, Montana – Metal Miners’ Honor Picket Line of Blood
From The One Big Union Monthly of June 1920:
“The Richest hill in the world” has once more been stained with the blood of workers. Its arrogant industrial autocrats of Butte have again taken refuge in murder to shield themselves from the organized power of the union miners. The lynching of Frank Little has been paralleled by the massacre on Anaconda road. Butte-naked, barren, black—the city of gun-men and widows, of “sweat-holes” and cemeteries, stands out before the world today a blot on what we call civilization. Machine guns and searchlights command the city from the heights. Armed soldiers guard the approaches to the mines and gun-men loiter at every corner, or whiz up and down the streets at all hours of the day and night. There is one place on Anaconda road where everything in sight has been riddled with bullets. The blood of the dead and wounded has hardly dried in the dust. Miners have been told in unmistakable language that their constitutional right to picket means nothing and that the will of the copper trust is mightier than the law of the land. Bloody Butte! It is an ignoble title—ignobly won. But it is a fitting title.
The overlords of Butte will not permit their right to exploit to be challenged. Drunk with unbridled power and the countless millions profiteered during the war, with lying phrases of “law and order” on their lips, the blood of workingmen dripping from their hands and the gold of the government bursting their coffers they face the nation unreprimanded and unashamed—reaction militant, capitalism at its worst. The copper trust can murder its slaves in broad daylight on any occasion and under any pretext. There is no law to call a halt. In the confines of this greed ruled city the gun-man has replaced the Constitution. Butte is a law unto herself.
This huge mining camp is typical of the present stage of capitalism. The parasites of big business, furious with the realization of their approaching doom, are striking at the working class more blindly,more ferociously and more frequently than ever before. Even their most savage anti-labor laws are proving themselves inadequate to darken the rising sun of solidarity.
The gunman and lynch-mob are more and more replacing the law as measures of labor repression. The old maxim “whom the gods would destroy they first make mad” is finding daily confirmation.
Holy grove, Ludlow, Calumet, Everett and Bisbee still stand as grewsome monuments to the White Terror in America. Butte has been added to the list for a second time. Armistice Day in Centralia is only a few month past yet we can no longer refer to it as “yesterday” but the day before. Yesterday was the massacre on Anaconda road. Nobody knows where the blow will fall tomorrow. Things are moving rapidly these days.
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday June 9, 1920
Butte, Montana – W. F. Dunne on the Anaconda Road Massacre
From The Liberator of June 1920:
Why Copper Is Red
By W. F. Dunne
ANOTHER crimson chapter has been added to the bloody history of Butte, Montana. It was written on April 21 when Winchester repeaters in the hands of gunmen of the Anaconda Mining Co;, poured their deadly loads of buskshot into a peaceful assemblage of striking miners.
Thomas Manning is dead, two more lie at the point of death, twelve more were wounded. Everyone of the victims was shot in the back.
The Butte Daily Bulletin of April 26, 1920
The miners struck on Monday, April 19. Their demands were as follows:
Release of all industrial and political prisoners. Six-hour day from collar to collar. Minimum wage scale of $7 a day for all workers in the mining industry. Abolition of the rustling-card. Abolition of contract and bonus and so-called efficiency system. Two men work together on all machines, and two men to work together in all workings.
The picket lines were sent out and by Tuesday evening, as they say in Butte, “the hill was clean.” The hoisting of ore ceased. The strike was called on Sunday, April 18, by Local 800 Metal Mine Workers Industrial Union of the Industrial Workers of the World, at two meetings attended by over 2,500 miners. For several weeks miners had been leaving Butte by the dozens, dissatisfied with the contract and bonus system instituted by the mining companies. Men were forced to take contracts and if they made more than a day’s pay received but a fraction of their increased earnings in their envelopes; if they failed to break enough rock, at the price per cubic foot paid, to equal a day’s pay, they were fired. At the Sunday meetings some speakers urged postponement of action until June but were greeted with silence. The miners wanted to strike and strike at once. The demands were drawn up, the strike declared and a committee appointed to close all of the boot-legging joints to eliminate trouble as far as possible. Between forty and sixty illegal places were closed on Monday evening by the miners committee but they were immediately told to open up the following morning by the authorities, and did so.
Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday June 8, 1920
Matewan, West Virginia – Miners and Citizens Battle Company Gunthugs
From the United Mine Workers Journal of June 1, 1920:
Ten or twelve men were killed in a battle between Baldwin-Felts gunmen and citizens of the town of Matewan, W. Va., on May 19. The exact number of deaths has not been learned, because it is said that one or more bodies were lost in the Tug river when some of the men attempted to swim across. The battle was the result of activities of the gunmen who were in the employ of the Stone Mountain Coal Company. It has been impossible also to obtain a correct list of the names of the dead.
Matewan is in the very heart of the Tug river field, one of the most notorious hotbeds of nonunionism in West Virginia. Coal operators in that field have for years resisted with all of their power the efforts of the miners to organize and join the United Mine Workers of America. They have employed all of the bloody tactics that have prevailed in such fields for many years, including the use of gunmen and thugs, the blackjack and other methods of repression.
A short time ago the miners employed at a mine owned by the Stone Mountain Company undertook to form an organization. The company immediately applied the usual remedy. It discharged the men from its employ. Then the company decided to evict the men and their families from the houses in which they lived and which were owned by the company. It was the thought of the company that this would help to break up the movement for the organization of a local union.
A large force of “detectives” was hired from the Baldwin-Felts agency at Bluefield, W. Va., and sent to Matewan to evict the miners and their families. An Associated Press dispatch from Matewan told the story of the battle as follows:
The shooting, in which Baldwin-Felts detectives clashed with citizens and the police, followed the eviction of a number of miners from Stone Mountain Coal Company houses yesterday, according to the authorities. Two mines were closed recently when it became known that an effort was being made to unionize them. The miners claim that the detectives were sent to dispossess families of workers who had been discharged.
A shot, said by the authorities to have been fired from the coat pocket of Albert Felts, a detective, and which ended the life of Mayor Cabell Testerman, started the battle. An instant later Felts, according to authorities, was killed by “Sid” Hatfield, chief of police. The shooting then became general, and when the battle ended seven detectives, the mayor, and four miners were dead and three other persons badly wounded. Felts, it is said, had a warrant for the arrest of Chief Hatfield on a charge that he had taken a prisoner from detectives some time ago. The mayor was reading the warrant when he was killed.
It was said that the gunmen wore badges as deputy sheriff’s of Harlan county, Ky., and that they had been imported from there to Matewan.
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday June 6, 1900
New York, New York – Garment Workers Meet to Establish International Union
From the New York Tribune of June 4, 1900:
An international union of cloakmakers and garment workers was formed in this city yesterday [June 3rd]. Delegates from Philadelphia, Baltimore, Newark and other cities met in convention in the Labor Lyceum, No. 64 East Fourth-st. The new organization will be known as the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Officers were elected as follows: Herman Grossman, president; Marcus O. Braff [Bernard Braff], secretary. General Executive Board—Isadore Silverman, Baltimore; Samuel Salat, New York; Joseph Schwarz, Philadelphia; Adolph Schwerger [Schweiger], Philadelphia, and Jacob Leibowitz, Newark.
President Grossman said that the principal objects of the organization included agitation for the adoption of union labels on all manufactured garments and the regulation of prices when feasible. It is expected that local unions will not only be formed in cities in the United States, but also in Canada. Between forty thousand and fifty thousand garment workers, the president said, would be represented in the new National body. The convention will be continued to-day.
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